 "Photo: Andrew Brant")
No one can deny the tragedy of the events that occurred at Northern Illinois University on Thursday. People lost their lives as a result of the actions of one man who entered a classroom, killed five people and wounded 16 more before turning the gun on himself.
During our staff editorial meeting on Sunday, we attempted to identify the catalyst not only to the savagery at NIU, but to all school shootings. We tried to discover why a person would resort to such an action, while looking for a solution to the apparent rise in school shootings across our nation.
We struggled to establish a profile of these attackers, reasoning that there must be some common thread identifying and linking shooters in order to predict and prevent future acts. But can anyone accurately paint such a portrait? While the majority of the assailants have been young, white males, this hardly constitutes a usable profile. Only a week prior to the attack at NIU, a woman killed two students at a Baton Rouge, La., vocational college and then turned the gun on herself. Last spring, Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old South Korean, killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. It seems clear that these attacks are an exceptionally U.S. phenomenon, with the worst attacks worldwide occurring in U.S. schools. If this violence is truly a U.S. epidemic, then we must ask ourselves: Is there something about our culture that breeds this?
Social critics and analysts debate over the prevalence of violence in Americans' daily lives, arguing that we have become oversaturated with brutality and death to the point of indifference. Commentators blame rap music, first-person-shooter video games, Hollywood and television for inundating us with images of massacre and destruction. The news media also does its part to intensify our exposure to such incidents; the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times ran a cover piece titled "Portrait of a Mass Murderer."
Perhaps these acts were perpetrated as a result of social antagonism. The notion of a bullied loner arose after the Columbine shooters were portrayed as outcasts among their peers, separated from the rest of their schoolmates due to their apparent non-conformist lifestyles. Their barbarity was assumed to be a reaction to years of bullying by their peers.
Yet a U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education study released in 2002 determined that 41 percent of attackers "appeared to socialize with mainstream students or were considered mainstream students themselves," and 44 percent were involved in organized activities, whether a sports team or other extracurricular activities.
It seems this phenomenon results not from a socially related reason, but rather a psychological one. We tend to look at the perpetrators as separate from their victims. Viewing gunmen as "others," allows us to deem them insane, having just "snapped." But to what extent can this be true as the vast majority of school shootings were not random acts, but calm and calculated assaults?
In 1966, Charles Whitman casually chatted with a postal worker inside his garage while sawing off a shotgun that he used only hours later to kill 14 and wound 31 people at the University of Texas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold collected and built their weapons for weeks before they calmly walked around Columbine, set off pipe bombs and killed 12. These are hardly examples of individuals suddenly snapping and going on a wild rampage.
Some suggest that recent generations have grown up in an increasingly cynical world - a veritable Age of Irony - resulting in a decreased recognition of the collective and an increase in egoism and narcissism. The rejection of the call for a homogenous society may push individuals to the extremes of their capabilities and capacities. Youth in particular are called on to conform to societal standards in order to pursue the ever more abstract American Dream and assimilate into "mainstream" culture. Rejecting the idea of a collective culture, our peers distance themselves from the rest of society, which leads our comprehension of the situational causes back to the myth of a loner but not progressing toward anything new.
A concrete profile to go by does not exist; there is no definitive cause behind these attacks. So what can we do? We must understand that there is no single solution to this issue. There are no quick fixes, and there cannot be simplistic reasoning behind our efforts to prevent attacks. The solution must involve the same level of complexity that the problem encompasses.
What we do know is that the people committing these acts have, for whatever reason, lost the sense of value for their own lives and the lives of others. Their inability to recognize the significance of human life furthers a willingness to take it away, whether it is their own or someone else's.
In order to counteract this, we as a culture must impart the lesson of treating each other with the compassion all human beings deserve. It is doubtful that social antagonism will desist, but we must oppose it through better insight into each other and ourselves. Unfortunately, we cannot rely upon societal impetus to push for a solution; as individuals, we should take it upon ourselves to reach out and work with each other in order to foster a more supportive and understanding world.
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